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POWER BI – A tool that redefines the Self Service concept

Brief:

Talking about Microsoft solutions come in mind one that develops Business Intelligence starting from Excel with add ins and now with a whole new plattform called Power BI. This solutions allows to create reports and attractive visualizations models integrating with Dashboards that can bring a new level of business information, with automatic refresh and the capacity for the end user to execute drill down to know about data details.

Article:

Power BI allows the end user to create connections to multiple sources in a same dashboard panel, and create a whole new model (cleaning and data transformation). With this tool the analyst can use the Q&A feature to ask the model in natural language about business info and the system can create from simple question tables and graphic reports using variables within the data model.

There are 2 versions: desktop and web, using a web-browser with a secure user/login.

Power BI Evolution

The BI world has been working on the Self Service meaningful idea that nowadays a business analyst can handle new tools to create business models, and genearte powerful reports using different kind of data sources (online and on premises). Also can handle major types of visualization with a high impact to the end user.

Microsoft started work with Excel Add-Ins allowing in the first time to develop data models but also adding technical value such as calculated columns, measures and KPI’s.

On the other hand, one powerful Excel Add-In named PowerView allows the creation of attractive graphic designs connecting to a PowerPivot data model.

With PowerMap as another Excel Add-In you can handle layers for geographic visualization of data from the data model. As a new Excel Add-In PowerQuery introduce web queries that the analyst can use to import web info, clean, transform and add to the data model.

This tool is just an evolution of a feature that execute a complete analysis of a business life cycle.

Study Cases

With experiences and differents projects in the financial, forest and energy world we developed Dashboards allowing our clients to create a general vision of their business with major key variables and parametrs. From each Dashboard they can handle alerts, share information with colleagues, and seek information from mobile native plattforms apps (iOS, Android, Windows) and create dynamic feedback to business key players.

Data Sources

Power BI suite allows us with a major variety of data sources, as we can see (the list is growing really fast month by month): ​

Access On Premises Sources – Personal Gateway:

The Personal Gateway is a new Power BI tool that gives to the Company the way to handle the data transfer from local data Sources (On Premises) to update Cloud datasets information.

When Power BI refresh the local source data, the personal Gateway guarantee that the Power BI account has the rights to connect to the data and execute the query to the On Premises server.

The data transfer form Power BI and the Personal Gateway is protected by the Azure Services Bus. The Service bus create a secure channel between the Power Bi Service and the computer. No needed to create or open a firewall port because you have with this a native secure and encrypt connection.

​As we can see in the image above as an example of a secure connections to an On Premises server that allows us to extract data from an Analysis Services cube to create reports or Dashboards. For now, on Power BI only supports connections to cubes created with Analysis Servers 2012 or major versions with a tabular model behind. Once the analyst establishes the configuration and connects to the cube (using Power BI Web or Power BI Desktop) we can use the cube data to develop reports and model the info to create powerful graphics as we can see below:​

Conclusions

The business analysis world is growing really fast and Microsoft help us with Power BI as a tool that redefine the Self Service concept giving to the business analyst a simple and faster way to connect, search, clean, transform business information, creating new models to conclude in high impact graphics, dashboards and reports.​​​}